Uncoding the mystery of the Da Vinci Code!

Unless some unforeseen incident blocks it, today the controversial movie the "The Da Vinci Code" will be showing in theaters worldwide. What's all the fuss about this movie? You want more? In www.jesusdecoded.com website you will find a mother load of information you've never read before and the truth about this controversy. To faithful Catholics and other Christians, a simple test would be to ask yourself, "Will the Da Vinci Code bring you closer to Jesus?" The answer of course is, no! If there's anyone who can bring us close to Jesus, it is our Mama Mary!

Now allow me to take on the major issues shown on this film in a nutshell. First off, Dan Brown claims that the famous mural of the Last Supper painted by Leonardo da Vinci depicts Mary Magdalene as the closest to our Lord Jesus Christ, whose head is leaning on the Lord's shoulder, much like what a lover would do. Nowhere in the Bible did it say that Mary Magdalene was with the twelve apostles during the Last Supper with Jesus.

If you count the number of disciples in that painting, they were 12. According to a BBC Special on Leonardo da Vinci last Friday, Leonardo was commissioned to paint the Last Supper at the exact moment when Jesus said that someone would betray him. Thus Judas was still included in that painting. So if there were 12 apostles, who then was missing? On this question alone, Dan Brown's falsehood is already exposed simply because he mistook the Apostle John, who so often is called John the Beloved as Mary Magdalene for he is the only one without a beard.

What does the Jesusdecoded website say about this? Here's a full quote: "Let's do the math. Jesus and twelve apostles (all men) =13 people. That's how many people are in the picture. If Leonardo wanted Mary Magdalene in there, he would have to paint 14 people. Let's do the history. The Last Supper was painted to decorate a dining room of a group of Dominican friars. Anyone of them was surely capable - especially when the painting was fresh and new - of noticing and asking why a woman was in the painting.

But there is no record of anyone thinking that the figure to Jesus' right was anyone but St. John because St. John was usually portrayed as a beardless, 'pretty' rather than handsome youth. This 'prettiness' was the artist's way of highlighting his youth. Log on to www.wga.hu, click on Enter Here, click on B under Artist Index, scroll down and click on Bassano, Jacopo, scroll down his paintings and click on his Last Supper to get an enlarged view and see another young and 'pretty' St. John." Strike one against Dan Brown! Another false claim made by Brown is that, the Emperor Constantine, for political reasons of his own, decided to make a God out of Jesus Christ who was solely a Jewish rabbi for whom neither he nor his first followers ever asserted a divine origin. Brown has no basis, nor has any evidence that proves that Emperor Constantine did such thing. It was the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD that defined the divinity of Christ and though that did not end the controversy, 50 years later, the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD) reaffirmed the teaching and the creed of Nicaea. This is why we have the Apostles Creed and the Nicean Creed that we pray today. Strike two!

Another issue Dan Brown is selling to us is about a secret society dubbed the Priory of Sion, which started in 1099 and has protected the bones of Mary Magdalene and documents about the bloodline of Jesus Christ. This is the single biggest blunder of Dan Brown! The Priory of Sion was actually started in France on May 7, 1956, by a con artist named Pierre Plantard (1920-2000). The Priory was first a civic organization and in 1960, Plantard created the mythology of a secret society led by figures such as Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci. This was borrowed from the other book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, written by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.

If the bones of Mary Magdalene were so secret, how come back in 1996, when I was in the South of France, I visited the Basilica Ste-Marie-Madeleine in St-Maximin-la-Ste-Baume near Nice where I saw the reliquary of Mary Magdalene, her skull placed on a golden helmet? Buy a Travel Guide on Provence and the Cote d'Azur; it is even featured there as a tourist site.

To summarize, a Capuchin priest, Farther Raniero Cantalamessa gave a Good Friday sermon in front of Pope Benedict and other Vatican officials in St. Peter's Basilica: "Christ is still being sold, no longer to the heads of the Sanhedrin for thirty pieces of silver, but to publishers and booksellers for millions of dollars," the preacher said. "Millions of people are being seduced by "clever rewriting of ancient legends." Hollywood has the habit of rewriting history and we saw that on the movie "Titanic" and recently "Pearl Harbor".

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